


Cancel the kindnesses deemed to accrue

by chantefable



Category: Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Autumn, Dreams and Nightmares, Extra Treat, Ghosts, Haunting, M/M, Post-Canon, Supernatural Elements, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-25 02:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12520776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: Death can be preferable to shame, and a quick death more merciful than a drawn out execution. Some dead do not see it that way.Or, years later, as a Praepositus in Belgica, Alexios is still haunted.





	Cancel the kindnesses deemed to accrue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



sic ait: "inmensa est finemque potentia caeli  
non habet, et quicquid superi voluere, peractum est [..]".  
Ovid

  


***

  
A rumble started in the sky.

The river foamed and ran freely, straining at the banks, and Alexios turned around to see horses galloping from the slopes. Beautiful, healthy animals, their manes and tails wild in the wind, their nostrils flaring, their eyes ablaze; as they approached, great in number and monstrously fast, Alexios realised they were all the same horse, replicated.

It was the horse of Glaucus Montanus.

Alexios stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, or speak, or draw a breath. The clouds scattered, and cold rain came streaming from the sky. Only it was not cold, not cold at all; after the initial chill of water had pierced him to the bone, Alexios felt an obscene lick of heat and smelled iron.

The world darkened around him, and the horses' pelts were painted a deep, wet colour. He watched redness sluice down his own exposed skin in rivulets.

He was naked, bare, vulnerable. Exposed to the fury of the storm, Alexios could do nothing but let it bathe him in blood before the herd of that thrice damned, dead horse, multiplied to infinity, reached him in a violent stampede.

He woke up.

It was autumn once again, and the chill was settling in, slow and heavy. Moisture seeped everywhere; the very skies felt porous like a honey-cake, only they did not ooze sweetness, only water. The rain was incessant, and yet infinitely milder than in Britannia. Over the years, Belgica had lured them all with the tenderness of its mists and mizzle: perpetual as they were, they never dug sharp cold claws under the skin. No, it was just a chill. 

At its darkest and eeriest, it was just a lick of Cerberus' rough, slobbery, chilly tongue.

In truth, Alexios had no excuse blaming the ghosts his mind conjured on anything. They were just… there.

Like any other day, he washed his face with cool water that seemed to carry a slightly putrid smell, no matter how fresh it actually was, pulled on his breeches – a barbarian fashion he had embraced, just like about everyone in the military who was not living in Rome proper – and put on his socks before lacing up his sandals. Duty awaited.

It was that time when summer was past, but winter was still teetering on the threshold. Persephone had already left her mother's embrace with a last farewell and a whirlpool of yellow leaves, and was hurrying into the waiting, barren arms of her husband. The mists lingered, heavy, loud and opaque; as if the veil between this world and the underworld was stretched thin, and one could hear the murmur from beyond.

Of course, it was nothing, just the hum of the fort and the sounds of nature, but the season was routinely making Alexios maudlin.

It had been five years since they had left Britannia, and yet he carried memories of it as surely as if he had inked them into his skin in blue. They were crisp, cresting memories of friendship and affection, rippling through him, smoothed by distance and maturity. Time had dulled the grief for lost friends and comrades for all of them. In his waking hours, out and about, Alexios was not weighed down by the choices he had had to make. 

But at night, whenever autumn began to creep up on them, memories rose like tidal waves, warped into something other and sinister. Alexios found them queer and altered: he was habitually dreaming of things that had never happened. However, it would have been cowardice to avoid sleep, so instead, he simply exhausted himself in daytime. Luckily, the chores and duties of the fort provided ample opportunity for staying busy, especially with winter approaching.

Sometimes it worked. And other times, he listened to the pitter-patter of the rain after nightfall, and fancied he could hear the harp: a melody brought from the court of the Caledone king. Sometimes, he heard the sound of hooves. Sometimes, he did not notice falling asleep.

He often dreamed of Cunorix. And those were usually simple, tender dreams, memories trapped in amber, as warm as something Hilarion might have cherished from his time with Lucius. Alexios dreamed of talking to Cunorix, hunting with him, feeling the warmth of his body at his side. But then the memory would bleed into something else, would change into something that had never happened, and Alexios remained frozen within the dream, powerless to impact it. Dreaming, he remembered what had truthfully occurred: the long ride, and the thrum of the chase in his veins, the closeness he had felt with Cunorix. But in the reality – in the memory that still remained safely with him in Alexios' waking hours – Alexios knew what had happened when they had dismounted. How they had smiled privately at each other, and Alexios had clasped Cunorix's hand, and kissed his mouth. Drops of dew had sparkled on the grass.

In the dream, however, everything was different. Whenever he dreamed, a milky haze would wrap around them, soft and frothy like forest mold, and no sunlight would penetrate the stubborn clouds. In the dream, Cunorix still smiled at him, but looked somewhere to the side, frowning. In the dream, Cunorix placed his hand on Alexios' shoulder and held on tightly. So tightly that Alexios' arm felt numb and dead. He glanced at it, and saw his swollen blue fingers letting go of a sword hilt. And the sword was black with blood.

They were all mortals in the hands of gods who rolled the dice, but wasn't it strange that Alexios felt it most acutely not on the battlefield, not wounded, not cutting the life-string of his love with his own hand, but in the dream, when all these things were long past?

In the dream, Cunorix did not look the way he had looked on that lovely day in life. He did not look the way he had looked when he had died. He looked years older.

Alexios woke up shivering under his blanket, like he always did. His sword arm ached.

The autumn dragged, alight with red and gold and on the cusp of blankness, blackness. Even though there was so much to do, in terms of stocking, training, and negotiating, and, for all their prudent planning, they needed every precious moment to get things right for the winter, Alexios inwardly pleaded with the gods to make haste. These days, mild as they were, stirred unease within him.

The nights he dreamed of Connla were the worst of all.

The wrongness of those dreams was like a dagger to the gut, unmistakable. If watching Cunorix, Alexios might get distracted by his dear face and experience moments of solace before realising that it had improbably aged, with Connla, realisation was always swift and staggering. He would be talking to Cunorix in his dream, reliving a treasured, tangible memory of a conversation they had had; he would glimpse a deer behind the branches, or be blinded by a stray ray of sun, or turn around – and where Cunorix had just been, a real and familiar presence dwelling in the corner of Alexios' eye, there would be Connla. 

Like a pebble skidding across the water and then sinking into the deep, Alexios thought that he had seen this dream before, that he had been seeing this dream for days – that he was now asleep and seeing it again. What busy days, he hadn't even noticed – but the rain, and he had just wanted to cover himself with a blanket for a short while...

He was standing in the meadow, the grass prickling his bare feet, and his fingers were tangled in the mane of a horse. Glaucus Montanus' horse, fire-hot and trembling. An equally hot presence was at his back, alive and vicious, and Alexios hoped, against all odds, that it would be Cunorix.

It had happened once, something similar, something that this fevered dream had warped and made more real than the memory: Alexios out with Cunorix, and him petting a horse, and Cunorix stepping close and making him turn around. Alexios wanted to see Cunorix again.

But it was Connla.

It was Connla now, every time.

He looked so tall and broad in the shoulders. His cheekbones were sharp and his mouth thin, yet oddly, dangerously inviting.

His flame-red hair was long and braided, and he looked confident, comfortable in his skin.

Alexios shuddered. He always shuddered, in the dream at this point and probably in his body as well. (If only he hadn't been alone in his bed, if only there had been someone to wake him. Nausea squeezed his insides. Alexios was trapped.)

Connla's skin was bare; he was wearing nothing but a wolf's pelt, and blue ink adorned his arms and chest. The swirls drew Alexios in, and the fangs cut him.

Connla had not looked like that. He had not looked like that the first year Alexios had come to Belgica, either. 

He had been changing, every autumn. Alexios could hardly withstand the bitterness in his gaze. 

Awake, alone, Alexios had made peace with what he had done, and every one of his decisions, no matter how torturous in the moment, felt rational and honest. Alexios' conscious mind had repressed and abandoned the regrets of the heart, for it saw no way to change the past and no other path that could have been followed. Awake, alone, five years later, Alexios was convinced that he had been merciful.

But dreaming through the long autumn nights, Alexios was anxious and afraid. 

Connla's stare was unforgiving, and he looked too beautiful, too alive, too cruel and strange to be a figment of Alexios' imagination. He advanced, as was his wont, and suddenly all Alexios could hear was the beating of Connla's heart, loud like a war-drum, filling the meadow, the world, and the very fabric of existence. 

Alexios' sanity was ripping thread by thread, and Connla's braids were flaying open his shoulders, Connla's laughter filling his mouth, Connla's fingers sinking into his chest.

He woke up drenched in cold sweat, feeling as if he had been spat back on the bank after taking a plunge in the river Styx.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to Catullus 73, in Peter Whigham translation (1966), this passage:
> 
> Original Latin: Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri / aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.  
> Literal English [1](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Catullus_73): Cease to want to earn well in any respect from anyone / or to think that anyone is able to become grateful.  
> Literal English [2](http://vroma.org/~hwalker/VRomaCatullus/073.html): Leave off wishing to deserve any thanks from any one, / or thinking that any one can ever become grateful.  
> Whigham: Cancel, Catullus, the expectancies of friendship / cancel the kindnesses deemed to accrue there.
> 
> The quote in the beginning is from Ovid's Metamorphoses, specifically from the tale of Baucis and Philemon: 
> 
> Original Latin: sic ait: inmensa est finemque potentia caeli / non habet, et quicquid superi voluere, peractum est [..]  
> Literal English [*](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Metamorphoses/Baucis_and_Philemon): So said: “The power of the sky is great and has no end, / And whatever the gods have wished is accomplished [..]"
> 
> Cerberus: in Greek mythology, the hound of Hades, monstrous multi-headed dog guarding the underworld.
> 
> Persephone: in Greek mythology, the formidable queen of the underworld, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades.
> 
> Styx: in Greek mythology, a river forming the boundary between the earth and the underworld.


End file.
